Western Europes last naturally caused famine ended 150 years ago this winter. In a poor and backward part of the Russian empire called Finland, more than a quarter of a million people nearly 10% of the population starved to death.

Finlands judicial system is the most independent in the world, its police the most trusted, its banks the soundest, its companies the second most ethical, its elections the second freest, and its citizens enjoy the highest levels of personal freedom, choice and wellbeing.

The Nordic countrys 5.5 million inhabitants are also the third most gender-equal in the world and have the fifth lowest income inequality. Their babies are the least underweight, their kids feel the most secure, and their teens perform the second best at reading (only third at science, though).

If you look at where we were then and where we are now, I think, absolutely, you can talk about a Finnish miracle, said Bengt Holmstrm, a Helsinki-born Nobel prize-winning economist not much given to exaggeration. How and why did it happen? Now thats a question.

There are limits, of course, to the usefulness of this kind of exercise: no two countries their circumstances, their histories, their people can be the same. Learnings may not be transferable. The magic sauce that made Finland would not produce the same results in, say, France.

It is true, too, that shown the long list of social and economic measures by which their country can only be judged a success, many Finns snort: emerging slowly from a long recession, with unemployment at 8% and a populist, nationalist party garnering up to 20% of the vote, the countrys not what it was, they say. Often, the response only semi-joking is, You mean other countries are worse?

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But inquiring after the sauces recipe of, among others, an economist, a philosopher, a sociologist and an ex-president, intriguing ingredients emerge.

To begin with, the geography and its consequence, the climate. We live, Tarja Halonen, Finlands president from 2000 to 2012, says carefully, in a cold, harsh and remote place. Every person has to work hard for themselves. But that is not always enough. You have to help your neighbours.

Bruce Oreck, who served as Barack Obamas ambassador to Helsinki (he liked it so much he stayed), says this has been a profound, long-term influence. Its made Finns self-reliant, private, but also dependent on a highly cooperative society, where rules matter. Its cultural, but its become part of the chemistry.

Of all the Finnish words that are hard to translate into English, the one Finns cite most is sisu: a kind of dogged, courageous persistence regardless of consequence. It is what, in 1939-40, allowed an army of 350,000 men to twice fight off Soviet forces three times their number, and inflict losses five times heavier than those they sustained.

The success of the countrys free national education system, established before independence in 1866 and regularly ranked among the worlds best, also has its roots in a more egalitarian society, says Jallinoja: Education was the key to advancement.

Not only that, says the philosopher and professor emeritus Ilkka Niiniluoto, but the whole country is actually a social construction created by university professors. The academics who led the countrys nationalist movement created Finland as a nation: its language, history, literature, music, symbols, folklore. The nationalist leader was a philosophy professor.

Since independence, nearly 30% of Finlands heads of state and government have been university professors, including half its early prime ministers. They shaped the country as we know it, says Jallinoja. But vitally, they also created confidence in social mobility, and real belief in education. That history comes with us.

If, however, Finland has been rated the worlds most literate country, it may also have something to do with a 19th-century decree that a couple could not marry in the Lutheran church before both passed a reading test. Quite an incentive, observes Halonen, to learn to read.

The magic sauce, then, seems based mainly on basic virtues: self-confidence, cooperation, equality, respect for education, trust. At bottom and in practice, says Anu Partanen, a Finnish journalist who now lives in New York, it boils down to a different quality of relationship. She calls it since it is shared to a greater or lesser extent by Sweden, Norway and Denmark the Nordic theory of love.

In the family, its realising that relationships can only really flourish between individuals parents, children, spouses who are equal and independent, Partanen says. In a society, it means policy choices aimed at ensuring the greatest possible degree of independence, freedom and opportunity for everyone.

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